Ep15: Inside Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

**Brad Gerstner** (0:00)
Take Tiablo Canyon. They built two nuclear reactors here. You know, this site was provisioned for six. For six reactors. I could imagine if you had four more reactors sitting here, if you could land them at the right price, you could have one reactor for Meta, one for Amazon, one for Microsoft, one for NVIDIA. You could have the data center sitting right next to them.
Bill, man, I couldn't be more excited to be here. We're sitting in probably your three wood distance from two nuclear reactors that are banging out two and a half gigs of clean power. We just had an incredible day with Maureen Zawalick down here at Diablo Canyon. You know, it's just this beautiful nuclear facility on the central California coast. It's really great to be here. When you look at this facility, you read about the positive impact on the local economy. Of course, it's the type of dense baseload power we so desperately need in California. You know, I think you said on a previous pod, somebody showed up with a value proposition of fission today. You know, it'd blow all of our minds. And here we were about ready to decommission this plant in 2016, which as Elon has said is incredibly brain dead. You know, I was pretty, I was pretty excited to see this week. And I was watching ESPM game day, I think it was at Texas A&M. And I see somebody holding up a sign, I love nuclear, like college kids are now holding up signs that say I love nuclear. So it's good to finally get down here and put on our analyst hat, dig in, ask a lot of questions and, you know, be able to share it with everybody.

**Bill Gurley** (1:55)
Yeah. And one thing, you know, two things, I think that are a little bit different about the podcast we're going to do today. One, you know, I think it's important to recognize we're obviously not nuclear experts, you know. We come at this from outside. That being said, the second point I would make is you and I have gone extremely deep in the past week or two and been given phenomenal access to a lot of people that have been in and around the industry for a long time and including getting access today at what is really remarkable. I mean, just to see it up close and the scale and how well run it is, it's just super impressive.
I'm certain that we're going to get some feedback from some people. Like, why are you guys talking about nuclear? My only qualification I would offer to everyone is, if someone comes at us with something that's different from what we said or that's added to the discussion, next time we're up, we'll talk about it and we'll bring that into the discussion.

**Brad Gerstner** (2:54)
No, absolutely. I mean, I think you and I talk about it pretty much on every pod. We're analysts. As analysts, the one thing we're reasonably okay at is, we ask questions, we dig in, we find our way to experts, we find our way to information. Frankly, the more digging we did about Diablo and about nuclear, it's just so clear that it has to be part of the energy constellation future of the United States.

**Bill Gurley** (3:20)
I think that's correct.

**Brad Gerstner** (3:21)
It's clean, it's dense, it's the exact type of energy that we need. Why don't we kick off with a little bit of background today? We'll weave in some discussion about Diablo. We're going to talk to Maureen Zawalick. We're going to talk about China's emerging advantage here. Why are they on such a fast path and a cheap path to nuclear? Hone in on those costs. Then some of the things that we believe we've got to do in order to get the United States back on the nuclear track and maybe end with a little bit of that positivity.

**Bill Gurley** (3:49)
That'd be great. One thing I wanted to share with the audience, I think we've uncovered some really amazing documents, pieces of research, podcasts, that kind of thing. So we're going to put a list of those together in the show notes. If anyone wants to follow the journey we've been on, go a little bit deeper than what we're going to talk about today, those will be available.

**Brad Gerstner** (4:14)
Maureen, it's great to be here. Maureen Zawalick, Vice President here at Diablo Canyon. It's just been an incredible day. Thank you for having Bill and I here. Maybe just a little background on Diablo Canyon. It took 10 years to build this starting in 1970 It cost $16 billion to build both reactors. It went online in 1985